Nothing profound or even much entertaining today; I’m just trying to be consistent in writing.
My family returned to Oklahoma from Texas just in front of Hurricane Rita, September 2005. Less than a year later I was still trying to figure out how to keep from being kicked out of Baptist churches while teaching about the Hebrew understanding of Scripture. I had made friends with the IT guy at one church and he was telling me they needed a mail server. I got hold of one of my friends from Texas, a fellow who had quite a collection of server boxes he used for running FidoNet nodes. He agreed to donate one for us to experiment with.
So we managed to find someone who could meet this guy and take the server box and drop it off on his way through town here. This was an unusually tall case, with a half-dozen bays on top for optical drives. Try as we might, the IT guy and I could not get anything to install, so I took it to my brother. He couldn’t decide if it was the board or the CPU, but both were obsolete. The IT guy at church said he had no further interest in it and church gave it to me.
After saving up a bit, I got a more recent motherboard bundle with CPU and RAM to run an early Sempron 64-bit. You can be sure I ran over a dozen different OSes on that thing before I sold it to someone as an XP box. It was still running when that person graduated to Win7 not so long ago… and she gave the thing back to me the other day.
More than five years after parting with it, I now have this monster tall Sempron tower sitting here running XP, and not very well at that. She had it overloaded with stuff that launched on boot-up. I haven’t rechecked the specs; all I remember is that it was my first 64-bit system. Right now there’s no place to set it up and test, but you can be sure I’ll need to wipe the drive. At this point, it just about has the power to make a fine CLI box, just about enough power to run a modern system without a GUI.
No, there’s no moral to this story. It’s just an example of some of the weird stuff that happens in this world.
